Telematics units within mobile vehicles provide subscribers with connectivity to a telematics service provider (TSP). The TSP provides subscribers with an array of services ranging from emergency call handling and stolen vehicle recovery to vehicle system status and diagnostics monitoring, global navigation system aided position identification, map services, and turn-by-turn navigation assistance. Telematics units are often provisioned and activated at a point of sale when a subscriber purchases a telematics-equipped vehicle. Upon activation, the telematics unit can be utilized to provide subscribers/users with a variety of telematics-facilitated services such as those described herein.
Novel methods of vehicle time sharing have developed in recent years in response to increased opportunities for monetizing the idle capacity of unused vehicles. Automobile rental services have targeted, for example, locations where the costs of owning and storing a vehicle are high relative to potential owners' available cash flows and where potential owners are likely to use vehicles for only a small percentage of the total available time. Meanwhile, more traditional automobile rental business models, such as those that maintain large vehicle fleets in the vicinity of airports to cater to business travelers and vacationers, have remained successful.
Automobile rental services and other automobile owners who intend to rent, loan or share their automobiles with other drivers may maintain accounts linking the telematics units with TSPs to preserve the functionality of telematics units for their customers and/or share groups. In the context of automobile rentals and rideshare groups, a certain degree of convenience is often sacrificed by the multiple users with regard to maintaining personalization information often established by/for specific car drivers/users. Examples of such personalization information include: radio station presets, audio settings (volume, balance, equalizer, etc.), imperial/metric, bookmarked websites, seat positions, mirror positions, heater and air conditioner settings, voice commands, voice messages, contact information, destinations (for navigation service), emails, hands-free call minutes, Internet browsing history, etc. Loaning/sharing a car and having it returned with the personalization information and settings changed, accessed and/or deleted can be unpleasant. In the case of a ride sharing arrangement where a vehicle owner potentially allows user of the vehicle by multiple strangers, the protection of personalization information from both access and alteration is especially a concern. The combination of privacy concerns and inconvenience of restoring changed settings may lead vehicle owners to either never use stored/storable settings or decline participating as a car owner in car sharing programs. Similarly, frequent renters/borrowers of shares vehicles face the constant need to spend several minutes adjusting personalization information on the vehicles they use on a shared or temporary basis.
Known systems limit access to certain functional components of a vehicle through user authentication prior to providing access to the functional component. Upon authentication, a user is subsequently permitted to configure access to particular vehicle components. Such systems, including for example the one described in Beiermeister et al., US Pub. No. 2008/0071546, focus upon controlling access to a set of protectable components of a vehicle having a telematics unit. The resulting configuration limits access by other users to particular functional components of the vehicle. Such functional components include a cellular phone, email, ignition, audio, navigation, and climate control.
The above body of information is provided for the convenience of the reader. The foregoing describes a suitable environment for which the described system and method are provided, and is not an attempt to review or catalog the prior art.